There’s a passage where Ana questions Jack about a past flame, Vincent, in a conversation about how having relationships in their line of work is tough. Jack’s big reveal is far from the point of the story, despite the fact that it’s the main takeaway everyone is running with.

This is a big deal because Soldier: 76 also joins Tracer as an LGBTQ character, who was revealed to be in a relationship with a woman two years ago in a comic release. Even though Overwatch is an ensemble game, Tracer is literally the box art character and the most iconic OW hero. Solider: 76 is one of the founding members of Overwatch and the ultimate OG of the squad, not to mention he’s effectively the game’s “starter” character as he’s who you play the tutorial with, and who most players will use to learn the ropes. So to have both Tracer and Soldier: 76 be gay, that’s rather significant in an industry where almost no major gaming icons are confirmed to be LGBTQ. The list is painfully short, and the highest profile character on it is probably Ellie from The Last of Us.

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There are, of course, currently 29 heroes in Overwatch, and only two are confirmed queer in canon, however high profile they may be. I’m genuinely not sure about which characters have even been confirmed as straight at this point (Torbjorn and Ana come to mind first as their children are in their game and we’ve seen their spouses in the lore).

Since Overwatch is a multiplayer shooter, practically all of its story and character development occurs outside of the game in cinematics, comics or stories like the Ana one. And romantic relationships only come up sporadically, if at all, as it never did when both Soldier: 76 and Tracer had their own animated shorts, for instance. Some are accusing of Blizzard pulling a JK Rowling with an “actually, Dumbledore is gay” reveal after the fact, despite that it never came up in the books or movies. But I think this is a different situation because Overwatch simply does not have a real in-game story, so information like this almost has to be dropped in bite-size chunks like this whether it’s a character’s favorite food or their sexuality.

Given how awful certain pockets of the gaming community can be, I am sure that someone, somewhere is upset about the Soldier: 76 reveal, accusing Blizzard of "pandering to SJWs” and the like, but that’s not a reaction I’m going to seek out, and I haven’t seen it organically so far yet. Everyone seems to be either A) happy B) claiming they knew he was gay all along C) indifferent. I think it’s cool, and it makes me want to play an actual Overwatch RPG where we can explore these characters more in the game itself instead of just reading lore alone.

OverwatchBlizzard

Overwatch is kind of an interesting case for this kind of reveal because it has a fan community that is avid about “shipping” all its various characters since day one, and there is fan art and fanfic for pretty much every male/male, male/female, female/female pairing there is out there, including robots, gorillas and hamsters, I might add. It’s so prevalent I sort of actually assume some of these fantasy pairings are real like Mercy is dating Pharah or D.Va is dating Genji. The point being an “official” reveal like this feels like sort of an upgraded version of fanfic, and because we’re not experiencing it in-game it lacks a bit of weight, so I sort of understand some of the Dumbledore comparisons from that perspective. Though again, that just isn’t what Overwatch is or has ever been, as much as I would like it to be.

It took two years for Overwatch to reveal its second LGBTQ character, and in two more years maybe we’ll see another. It may not mean that much for the game itself, but it’s a rather cool moment all the same that both the male and female figureheads of a game this big have been written to be queer. Though fans have been well ahead of the game on this one from the start.